An ant infestation
eating out his meat filled head,
and an ear dropped ever so
carelessly in a field —
this opens up a brand new world
etched beneath that plastic surface.

Who killed Laura Palmer?
The myth of the picturesque
family life is really such a ruse,
and for it to be severed discreetly
from the underbelly throbbing
under the father’s scrutiny,

requires the killing of his daughter,
and so the mastermind creates
this supposed supernatural world
refracting a glimmer of raw brutality
coming from this reality.
It is to be left unmolested:

The stark blue of velvet spitting from his mouth
with her thighs opened towards him; a temptress
archetypal as everyman’s story. He hits her,
but what else exists when man’s frustration
with women — with illusion — with deceit —
leads down a lost highway

past sand worms and prophets, past midgets dancing
in another world, past heads making erasers, past
Dr. Treves and John Merrick — the elephant man,
and through years of avoiding
the straight story;
the mastermind is still only a normal man: steel gray hair,
a happy little family — placed between two worlds:
Fire walk with me.

Stomach Pains

The sweat beads running steadily
into the slits of my eyes and salting
the line of my lips.

Billy my neighbor offers me
a cup of water. The head I have nods
heavy, and alien, as the

breaths coming out squeeze my lungs
like the indrawn wheeze
of an accordion.

He chuckles
and points at the glass perspiring
over my hand, now all empty.

You swallowed
a tadpole, he confides holding his sides.
I have felt it growing these weeks

and during the day
he avoids atrophy by jumping around
and he gives me diarrhea

while at night
he croaks so loudly that my parents
just the other day told me

that they think I must have
some kind of snoring problem,
but I could not make them understand

the creature that I have growing
so deep inside the pockets of my body,
so deep that it has now become me.

Paul Piatkowski lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has had poetry published in U.S. 1 Worksheets. He currently teaches high school English in the town of Welcome.
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